The present invention relates to a holder for securing in position a plurality of slides to enable a composite photograph thereof to be taken, for example for cataloguing a slide library or the like.
It is important to understand the benefits of a slide catalogue to a large institution having a slide library. A slide library represents a very expensive and valuable resource for its owner. The costs involved in hiring photographers and taking a large number of slide pictures is very high. Also the time involved in organizing, cataloguing and creating the library itself represents a significant investment. If proper benefits are to be realized from such an investment in such a library, members of that particular institution and outside users must have access to it. If the users are permitted total access they will inevitably reduce the effectiveness of any cataloguing system that has been set up by misplacing slides and/or removing them totally. This results in a disorganized and nonfunctional library and/or significant expense in repairing the damage thereby done. While the library may decide not to let users have any access to the library, such an approach results in little use of the library and the sizable investment in that library is essentially wasted. A third alternative may be to allow users access to the library only in the company a trained librarian. Again such alternative is very expensive. Added to these difficulties is the fact that the library exists usually only in one location. Anyone from a different city or even in a different location in the same city must travel to the library to select and obtain the slides from it or rely on a librarian to select the most appropriate slides for them. A catalogue of the slides held by that library, which catalogue is readily available to users of the library to enable them to choose the slides which they wish to have, would clearly avoid many of these problems and at the same time increase the visibility and exploitation of their resource.
There has been very little technology developed to assist in cataloguing slides for a slide library. Often just a filing system, in which the subject matter of slides is identified in writing and related to a location of the slides in the filing system is used. Other times, duplicates of the slides themselves are made available to users of the library, for selection purposes. This again multiplies the organizational confusion in direct ratio to the number of satellite libraries created. The duplicating cost, additional equipment, trained personnel and floor space required represents additional cost. In other instances, four-colour printing of slides, for example, only 20 to a page at full size, and making multiple copies thereof may be used to provide a visual reference catalogue for a slide library. In the case of such four colour printing, unless there is a requirement for massive distribution, the costs of such a catalogue are extremely high.
A reference of general background interest, describing a method and apparatus for photographic recordation of multiple images, is Clark U.S. Pat. No. 4,115,002 issued Sept. 19, 1978.
It is an object of the present invention to provide an apparatus for economical creation of full colour high quality catalogues of large slide libraries and the like. It is a further object of the present invention to provide an apparatus for holding slides, for example 2 inch square 35 mm slides, to enable 28 of such slides to be photographed onto an 81/2 by 11 inch page at 100% size (as opposed to 20 slides using current methods) or 40 slides to be photographed onto such a page at 85% size (as opposed to 30 slides using current methods). It is a further object of the present invention to provide such an apparatus which will facilitate identification of such slides enabling a proper catalogue number to be associated with each slide on the composite photograph taken. It is also an object of the present invention to permit fast and efficient photographic reproduction of large quantities of slides in composite, catalogue form.